Drinks to help you make the most of dry January
Torres Natureo Rosé, Spain NV (from £6, ocado.com; amazon.co.uk; tanners-wines.co.uk) The hunt goes on, and still has something of the holy grail about it: is it possible to make a genuinely convincing 0% wine (or 0.5%, I’m not picky)? Things have certainly improved – enormously so since I had my first sip of one of the originals of the breed, Eisberg, back in the 1990s, and rapidly over the past five years. There are some seriously clever and talented people on the case, both making and, in the shape of the outstanding Club Soda with its website and Covent Garden tasting room, selling them. But we are still at the stage where the products themselves are not-quite-as-good facsimiles rather than something you’d actively choose to drink. Grudging credit where it’s due though, and there are a couple of 0% wine brands that to me come closest to the real thing: the Zeno range, notably the Alcohol Liberated Red (£10.95, drydrinker.com) and Spanish producer Torres’s Natureo range, led by the pretty rosé.
Karl May Organic Riesling Kabinett, Rheinhessen, Germany 2022 (£15.99, or £13.99 as part of a mixed case of 12 bottles, laithwaites.co.uk) If you’re doing damp rather than fully dry January, you might well be tempted by one of the burgeoning bunch of mid-strength wines, which aim to provide all the fun of full-strength wine with around a third or half of the alcohol (7% or 8%). That does indeed sound pretty tempting on paper, but in reality, the wines, while certainly having more to commend them as “authentic” wines than alcohol-free bottlings, rarely measure up. My problem really is with the mid-strength wines that have started their lives as full-strength wines, before having some of the alcohol removed using a piece of kit known as a spinning cone: they always have a palpable gap in the mid-palate where the alcohol used to be, and which producers try and fail to cover with extra sugar. No such problem with wines which are naturally, and traditionally light, and made, instead, without fermenting all the sugar into alcohol, as is the case with the classic dancing, graceful, orchard-fruit-filled, 9.5% abv Karly May Kabinett.
Peony Blush Sparkling Tea NV (£11.50, Waitrose) Whenever I’m having a period of abstinence – whether that’s a day, a week, a month or the practice of interchanging one alcoholic drink with another that is apparently (though I’ve never heard anyone say it in the wild) known as “zebra striping” – I almost always default to drinks that are wine-like in some way, rather than pared back, defanged versions of “proper” wine. This is where I find drinks that I actually like and admire in themselves – drinks I might even choose over wine in a period of non-abstinence, maybe even adding, in a mildly rebellious anti-prohibitionist way, a dash of whisky or vodka to give them a bit of a psychoactive kick. I now have a handful of trusted favourite producers and brands, which include the wine-alike brands Wednesday’s Domaine and Blurred Vines, wine-like kombucha makers LA Brewery, and a bunch of sparkling teas, including Jing, Saicho, Copenhagen, and, a new one for me this year, The Real Drinks Co’s Peony Blush, a dry, 0.5% abv made from White Peony tea from Fujian in southeastern China, which has a very wine-like, soft, red-fruited, palate-filling charm.
